Where to Find Marketing Inspiration for Your Home Business

If you own a small to medium sized home based business, you may find yourself running short on marketing inspiration. This is one of the most common complaints I hear from women home business owners. You wear several hats in your business ... web designer, writer, internet marketer, customer service agent, business analyst... and more! With so much on your business plate each day (not to mention what is happening in the rest of your life!) it can be a challenge to come up with new and fresh marketing inspirations. Where can you get some new ideas?

Guess what? It's as simple as turning on your radio or TV, or surfing the internet. This is a fun, quick and free way to learn new marketing techniques and strategies. There's no shortage of advertising in the world, so you won't need to work too hard! Did you know that by the age of 65, the average American will have seen over 2 million television commercials? Yikes!! That's not even counting the ads we see in newspapers, magazines, on billboards, on the internet, or on the radio.

You'll notice that some companies choose to use catchy jingles and slogans. When I was a kid (now that was a while ago!) I remembered the "Alka-Seltzer" commercials. Who can forget "I can't believe I ate the WHOLE thing!!!" Other use music that is so catchy that you might even find yourself humming the tune. Other ads tug at our heartstrings to establish an emotional connection (remember those AT&T commercials?), and some even purposely annoy us! Watch these commercials and learn ... think about how you can apply these to your business. Marketing inspiration is just a click away!

Once you've spent some time ad watching, you'll notice some patterns and common themes. These basic marketing techniques and strategies will help you t build a winning marketing campaign.

• Keep it simple. One great example of this is Nike's slogan "Just Do It". Create a simple, catchy, and easy to remember slogan can set your product or service apart from the competition.

• Capture your target market's emotions and they will become your loyal customers. Remember the days before people had unlimited long distance? Phone companies created commercials featuring a depressed, lonely older woman who brightened up and became happy when her daughter called her from across the country. The phone companies knew that people considered long distance a luxury item, so they pulled at their customers heartstrings. People were moved by the ad and immediately thought of their own mothers and how they could instantly brighten her day by calling her.

• Be memorable - annoy your customers! People remember feelings and any strong feeling can cause people to remember your product. Have you seen the product Head On!? Their annoying commercials featured people with headaches, saying, "Head On" over and over again. Yikes!! The people who saw the commercials may have found them annoying, but they remembered the product and some of them became customers.

• Be funny. If you have a sense of humor, this can be one of the BEST marketing techniques! People love to be entertained. One of the best example's I've ever seen of this are the TV commercials for the Mac ... they're hilarious! There are two guys, one says "I'm a Mac (he looks like the artistic type) and the other guy (who looks like Bill Gates) says "I'm a PC". They engage in all kinds of hilarious antics, all designed to point out the Mac's benefits while making the PC look rather silly. Another one - very funny!!.

  LI>Cater to moms. More and more marketers are discovering that moms are the ones who make purchasing decisions for their families. Major companies are learning that if they want to sell more products, they need to make it more appealing to moms.
  

These are just a few of the strategies that top marketers use to promote their products and services. The next time you need some marketing inspiration, have some fun by turning on the TV or picking up a magazine. Keep an idea file, full of ads you have seen that you particularly liked. The next time you are trying to come up with a marketing campaign, look through your idea folder for marketing inspiration and adapt one of your clippings to your own product or service. Then, release your marketing campaign and see what happens!